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This chapter introduced you to the sociology of education and the important debates of contemporary research in this field. Some debates argue that Canada is a schooled society given the unprecedented enrolment numbers in higher education, the necessity of higher education for labour market participation, and the diversification of modern education’s form and function.
Other debates in this field revolve around its function. The obvious and intended functions of education are referred to as its manifest functions. Some sociologists believe there are also latent functions, those unintended lessons students learn from schools. These functions, in turn, fall into three broad categories: socialization, selection, and legitimation. Education is seen by Durkheimian sociologists as functional for society since it socializes individuals with the norms and rules of society. Weberian sociologists see education as fulfilling the necessary function of selecting individuals for social positions, leading to the issue with what Randall Collins called credentialing. Marxian sociologists see the third major function of the education system as legitimating certain types of knowledge. Marxists are concerned with the way that education systems reproduce the class system by disseminating capitalist-friendly knowledge via teachers and the school curriculum. Marxists believe this constitutes what they call the hidden curriculum—the unintended knowledge students learn from an education system implicated in the reproduction of social inequality.
Finally, you also learn in this chapter how social class, gender and race/ethnicity intersect to influence education outcomes and returns from educational investments in terms of wages. This connection is present in every country with a functioning education system.